Leaving aside all the happy talk we heard this week about how much better the security picture is in Baghdad, the fact is that the escalation or surge has failed utterly.

Fred Hiatt:

First, the president failed to acknowledge that, according to the standards he himself established in January, the surge of U.S. troops into Iraq has been a failure --

Gail Collins:

But no amount of smoke could obscure the truth: Mr. Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed.

But, but, but...

What does it mean? The Emperor has no clothes. Okay, we all get that now. What are we going to do about it?

If we all know that the President's 'return on success' is nothing but a dead parrot, do we have to go on pretending otherwise?

One of the more telling moments came last night on MSNBC. Immediately after the speech, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and a panel of guests couldn't resist the temptation to eviscerate the President's performance, mock it, and question his sanity. Joe Biden came on and gave a remarkable response. He basically said that he had no idea what the President was thinking...that he was deeply delusional and grossly dishonent. And then they brought on Mike Huckabee, who stuck to the talking points: the surge is working, we have to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq... The contrast was so jarring that it made Huckabee look ridiculous. He was trying to tell us that the parrot is alive, when it has clearly joined the choir invisible.

The failure of the President's September marketing scheme is total. The product has flopped. In fact, it should be recalled like so-much Chinese wheat gluten.

And, yet...

"We don't have the votes."

John McCain is traveling around the country in a bus. In 2000, this was the Straight-Talk Express. Today it just says 'No Surrender'. I wonder if Bruce Springsteen is destined to unwillingly serve a Republican presidential candidate's race in every election cycle. What does 'No Surrender' even mean? Are we preparing to hand over the keys to the White House to some foreign power? Who the hell are we going to surrender to? Iraq?

This is the furthest thing from Straight Talk. What a road we have traveled.

Fred Kaplan:

President Bush's TV address tonight was the worst speech he's ever given on the war in Iraq, and that's saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

Why parse something so uniformly dishonest? Better to just bang this dead parrot against a counter. There's really no need to dig down and critique the speech on a point by point basis. It was total crap, from beginning to end. And the country can't function if its executive is uniformly booed off the stage. Bush really needs to go. That's the lesson of last night's speech. But in the Versailles by the Potomac we live in, it's far more likely that the President will just get his money and his way.

It's time for the Democrats to get serious. Their political position has never been stronger, and it is unlikely to ever get as strong as it is at this moment. It's time to get shrill...and do something drastic.